You’re traveling to a city/country you’ve never been to before, and will likely only ever visit this one time in your life.
Is your priority to see the major tourist attractions i.e. “see the sights,” or would you rather just do some wandering around i.e. “take in some local color”? You don’t have time to do both. Well, obviously there is always going to be some time for “local color,” e.g. evenings/nights, but I’m wondering about which of those two things you prefer to make the primary focus of your touring.
I suppose what I’m really asking is how important is it to you to, for example, visit the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, or the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, as opposed to just walking around visiting cafes and shops or whatever?
A combination. I love to wander, but I try to take in the sights. For instance, in Paris, I saw the Louvre, The Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur, and Notre Damn, but didn’t get to the Eiffel Tower and just walked in the courtyard of the Louvre. I also wandered around the area near the Ile de La Cite on both banks, checking out the bookstores and having a glass of wine in a cafe.
Depends on what the tourist sights are - if you miss the Louvre you’ve missed the art treasures of half the world. If you miss the Arc de Triomphe you didn’t miss much, IMHO.
I tend to go to the sites, but only the ones where it’s not a major pain to get into. For example, I have been to Washington DC five or six times, but have never been inside the White House or the top of the Washington Monument, and I never went to the Statue of Liberty in three visits to New York City when it was open.
Me, I’m a wanderer. Couldn’t give a rats ass about the tourist sights. I talk to some of the locals, find out what they like to do, and I go do that. Hasn’t failed me yet.
I like to see the tourist sites by walking from one site to another. For instance, when I was in London I might walk from my hotel near Regent’s Park to the British Museum to Westminster Abbey and then to Buckingham Palace (and then either walk or take the tube back to the hotel).
I have little interest in shopping or visiting cafes while I’m on holiday.
I generally try to live as one of the locals for a while, because I’d hate the idea of being part of an organised group and having to visit places at set times etc. Then again, I usually go so that I can photograph things - I’ve just come back from a week wandering around the Pisa area with my Yashica Mat - and so paradoxically I tend to avoid the major landmarks, or at least only visit them as a cursory box-ticking exercise. Other people have photographed them before me, better than me, with better equipment, so what’s the point? I mean, the world doesn’t need another photograph of the leaning tower of Pisa, it would be a waste of film. Unless it happens to topple over just as I arrive. But then again if it was a trip to Peru I’d be mad to miss Machu Picchu, albeit that some bastard’s spent a month of sunsets there with a Hasselblad and a carbon fibre tripod and a helicopter.
But I’m conflicted, see. I’d hate to romanticise the mundane reality of somebody else’s life. I used to live in London; I was conscious that some people dreamed of visiting London, home of Sherlock Holmes and Elizabeth Hurley. But the real lives of actual Londoners involve commuting bleary-eyed on the tube for ages before spending hours doing boring work and then commuting home again, too tired to do anything on the weekend, unable to afford somewhere to live, surrounded by millions of people failing to connect. That’s probably the reality of actual everyday life in Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Scott Base in Antarctica, all around the world, except that they don’t have the London Underground abroad. It only goes out so far. Roger Ebert often writes about his love of London, but he doesn’t really love London at all, he loves a tiny snapshot, a few touristy streets and expensive restaurants near Piccadilly Circus that he was visiting on holiday. London isn’t like that.
I mean, you’re never going to be one of them. The local colour you see is always going to be skewed by your presence. The people in Marrakesh who were so eager for me to eat at their restaurant didn’t seem too keen on admitting the locals. The kind of places where the locals ate, they’d be thinking “what the f?” if I strode in through the front door. And when I was in France, I was very conscious that at the end of the week I was going home to England, but the people of France were stuck there. Trapped in France. They must have been thinking along the same lines as me, because I sensed pride in their eyes, tingled with hopelessness. I admired their bravery. Trapped in hell, but still standing.
So, the local colour becomes just another box-ticking exercise, much like the famous landmarks. There’s no difference. I believe Johnny Rotten made the same point with fewer words in Holidays in the Sun. Ultimately my solution was to just not care. The world is a parade of novelties designed for my amusement. You’ll get yours soon enough. We are all trapped in hell.
I mean, the supermarkets in France, they don’t even have proper loaves of bread, did you know that? Just tiny loaves… square, it’s not proper bread. And the rest of the produce, it’s as if the microwave didn’t exist. The food’s raw, for heaven’s sake, you have to cook it! You have to speak to the person behind the counter and he or she picks it up and puts it in a bag! For heaven’s sake, this is 2012.
You don’t have to choose, you just need to do a better job of scheduling.
When I’m traveling, I generally have a route for the day, based on what’s open that day, what closes early (or opens late), and what’s the most obvious way to go from point to point. Then I start in the morning and see what’s on my list. When I can, I walk or take public transportation, so I can see what’s going on around me. I tend to get lost a lot, so I do wander. And I have a general rule that if I see something interesting, I should stop and enjoy it.
Given my personality, I’d regret it if I missed any of the really touristy sights, especially if it were in a place that I might never get to go again. And as long as I work in enough time to wander, I’m good.
Absolutely wandering around. For me, the tourist sites are just there to give you some kind of framework around which to arrange your wanderings, lest you start dwelling too much on the creeping nihilism behind the question "What am I going to do today?’ What I am going to do today? I am going to the Louvre.. It gives you something to tell yourself, even if what you will actually do is get lost on the way to the Louvre, drink a cappuccino in a department store cafe, wander some back alleys, eat lunch, decide lunch was good and eat lunch again, then strike up a conversation with the waiter and go clubbing with his friends that night.
My primary goal when I travel is to come back with lots of interesting stories to tell, and it’s very hard to get a good “the time I went to the museum” story, but very easy to come up with good “The time I got lost trying to find the museum” stories.
Honestly, I don’t really even care where I go. I remember once realizing I had hopped on the wrong night bus in India, and had absolutely no idea what city I’d end up at in the morning. It worked out. You are always somewhere, after all.
I do a bit of both. I research what I’d like to do, see and eat when I travel, then I organize things by location/neighborhood. So when we’re wandering around a place we can look to see which things we were interested in are nearby our current location.
It means we miss some “must-sees.” Like Buckingham Palace when we visited London. It was simply never in the same neighborhood we were.
This is perhaps the saddest or dumbest post I have ever read, and I’m not even sure what you’re advocating, perhaps staying home and being miserable for cheap?
Why would you give two fucks what the locals would think if you went to a non-tourist trap restaurant? Fuck them, you’re there to eat.
What the hell are you talking about romanticizing someone’s everyday life? Why not it is new to you so of course it is interesting, I’m sure they’d be excited to be in a new city as well who wouldn’t? :rolleyes:Well I was looking forward to trying this conch salad but did you know there are people who eat this everyday?! OMG I am romanticizing someone’s daily grind HELP!
Just enjoy and experience new things, stop worrying about placating the politically correct ironic hipster gods.
We usually make a short list of our “must see things” that are traditional tourist destinations. We ask each person, “What would you spend the rest of your life wishing you’d seen?” Then we see those things and spend the rest of the time seeing our B-list items or just wandering around.
I read up as much as I can on the interesting places in a region, pack a bunch of maps, and go for it. If there’s someplace I absolutely want to visit I’ll make reservations, but otherwise I decide where to go on the fly.
This is usually how I do it. I usually find that a lot of tourist destinations are only tourist destinations because they’re so cool that tons of people want to see them. There are always exceptions to that rule (Pisa, I’m looking at you), but I’ll never regret having gone to the Colosseum or the top of the Eiffel Tower instead of having a coffee in a hipster cafe. If I have time for a coffee in the margins, fantastic, but I plan around the sights for the most part.
As for the OP, we usually plan our trip around some sights, but they aren’t necessarily the main attractions. We were just in Shanghai last month and my favorite part was the Propaganda Museum. Not really a major tourist stop, but it was just our cup of tea.
Some sites, but mostly wandering. In Iran recently I visited most the famous sites in Esfahan, Shiraz and Mashad, but usually try to eat at places where I am the only foreigner (easy enough in the places I like to travel). In Damascus I wandered the back alleys and met some kids with a goat playing soccer… that’s more my style than seeing tourist crap in souvenir shops.
What I usually do is pick one or two things I want to see, and wander on my way there. For example: in Paris, I wanted to see the Sacre Coeur. Instead of leaving the subway in the closest station, I exited a bit further back so I got to see the area around the SC and approach it from a different angle than the usual “here’s the SC, go up, take pics, go down” crowd.
The ratio will vary depending on how safe I feel, local geography, whether I know the local language, etc. For example, I was in a hotel in Brazil which was boxed in between two highways, and I didn’t have a car. Well, I sure didn’t go wandering around the neighborhood a lot.
A lot of my travel is for business reasons, visiting factories. So it naturally takes me to such exotic locations as factory cafeterias or industrial area restaurants, but also to places which the locals know and the tourists don’t (like that restaurant, same small Brazilian town in the jungle no tourist ever vists, where the fish comes from their own fish farm).
Either you need a better life or to see a therapist. Maybe both.
